What Never Happens

by Anne Holt

  Never again.

  He scraped the snow with the tip of his boots, wanting to cover the puke, but he lost his balance. The taxi driver helped him into the car. Took him home. Everything was forgotten, and it was the last time ever.

  Since then, no one had asked.

  The bachelor party, from which he eventually crawled home, had grown during the course of the night. At six o’clock on Friday evening, nineteen men dressed immaculately in tuxedos had headed into town. Then they met Bård’s football team, with dirty red shirts and a victory to celebrate. The party grew in size. Things started to warm up. Ten or twelve of Bård’s colleagues appeared at around eight o’clock, when the bridegroom was selling French kisses from a stall on Karl Johan for fifty krone a shot. By the time his brother slurred that Trond had to help him to the bathroom to release the pressure at around half past ten, the party had turned into a blind drunk, random, rowdy bunch of men: the Skeid team, some economists from Telenor, a gang of cricket players from Hokksund that had tagged along since about nine, and the odd drunk whom they didn’t know from Adam.

  At least fifty people, Trond thought.

  And no one had noticed.

  No one had told the police anything other than that Trond was at his brother’s bachelor party from six o’clock on Friday evening until someone put him on the first bus to Lørenskog the next morning.

  Everyone had said that. Everything was forgotten.

  “What makes you say that?” he finally asked.

  “Can’t you just tell me where you were?”

  His voice was no longer impatient. His brother was pleading with him now, a whining, demanding little brother voice that Trond recognized from childhood and that still annoyed him.

  “What makes you say that, and why are you asking me now?”

  After all, he was the oldest.

  Bård shrugged his shoulders.

  “What with everything that’s happened . . . I’ve had other things to think about. But now, now that . . . You just disappeared! I looked for you everywhere. After I’d taken a leak. You helped me. Do you remember?”

  Trond nodded but said nothing.

  “You were the only who wasn’t absolutely trashed. I wanted to borrow some money. Spent over three thousand krone. Think I bought rounds for everyone. You weren’t there. Couldn’t find you anywhere.”

  “Did you ask anyone where I was?”

  “Everyone was asking where everyone was all the time! Don’t you remember? We just about had the run of the place. It was crazy.” He grinned, then pulled himself together. “The next time I saw you, it was three minutes past twelve. And I’m sure about that, because you made such a big thing about your watch, the one you got from—”

  “My watch? I didn’t have my watch on.”

  “Yeah you did, cut the crap. When we had that beer-drinking competition, you stood on the bar and took the time with that monstrosity on your arm.”

  Trond flushed. And then got hotter. He could smell his own body odor, sharp and bitter. His bladder was bursting. He wanted to get up. He wanted to go to the bathroom, but his knees refused to help him.

  “Why did I admit it?” he thought. “Why didn’t I just deny it? Bård was shitfaced. He might have made a mistake. Confused the times. There were so many people there. Everyone said that I was just mingling and drinking. Showing off. I should have denied it. I had every chance to deny it. I’ll deny it.”

  “You’re getting it all confused,” he said and clutched the table with both hands. “I didn’t go anywhere. You fell asleep on the toilet. Don’t know how long you—”

  “What the hell are you saying? I know I didn’t fall asleep! I didn’t get to bed until eight the next morning. I was pretty drunk that night, but not enough not to notice . . .”

  Trond forced himself out of the chair. He took a deep breath. Pushed out his chest and held his shoulders back. He was the big brother. Bigger, too, several inches taller than his brother.

  “I need to piss,” he barked.

  “Right?”

  “You’re my brother. We’re brothers.”

  “Right,” Bård repeated with a puzzled, slightly irritated look, as if Trond was wasting his energy trying to convince him that the world was around and circled the sun. “And?”

  “You’re wrong. I was there all the time.”

  “Do you think I’m a complete idiot, or what?”

  He slipped around the table and stood in front of Trond, his fists balled. Bård was shorter than his brother but much stronger. Their faces were barely a hand apart.

  “You admitted it ten minutes ago,” he hissed, his eyes narrowed. Trond felt a fine shower of spit on his skin.

  “I admitted nothing.”

  “You said that you couldn’t say anything to Stubo. You said that you’d lied. Isn’t that admitting, or what?”

  “I really need to piss.”

  “Admit it.”

  Bård punched his brother on the shoulder. Hard, with his fist.

  “Admit.”

  Suddenly, without warning, Trond grabbed him around the waist. Bård struggled to keep his balance, holding onto his brother’s shirt with his left hand as he tried to find something solid to hold onto with his right. A bit too late, he noticed that Trond’s foot was in the way as he tried to take a step sideways. They fell over. As they went down, Bård got caught on the electric cord of the mixer. A survival instinct made him move his head when he saw the heavy Kenwood. The steel edge caught his ear. He howled and tried to lift his hand to feel the wound. His arms were pinned down. Only his head was free, and he threw it from side to side as he shouted.

  Trond punched him.

  Trond sat with a knee on each of his brother’s arms and let rip.

  He closed his eyes and laid into his brother.

  When he was exhausted, he got up quickly. He smoothed down his hair, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened and wanted to pretend that nothing had. His brother groaned. Blood was pouring from his ear. One eye had already started to swell up. His upper lip was split. His shirt was torn. His upper groin was soaking, a dark butterfly-shaped patch on the khaki material of his pants.

  “You’ve pissed yourself,” Bård slurred, holding his ear. “You’ve fucking pissed on me.”

  He sat up, stiff and unsure if anything was broken. He studied his damned hand and then put it over his ear again.

  “Is the lobe still there?” he asked. His voice was hoarse, and he spat out some blood. “Did I lose my earlobe, Trond?”

  His big brother crouched down and looked at the wound.

  “No. Nasty cut. The ear’s all there.”

  Bård started to laugh. At first Trond thought he was crying. But his brother was laughing, he laughed until he coughed, holding his knees, roaring with laughter and spitting blood.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he groaned. “You’ve never beaten me up before. You’ve never even managed to tackle me to the ground. Have you ever been in a fight before?”

  “Here,” Trond said and gave him a hand.

  “Wait. Hurts everywhere. Have to do it myself.”

  It took him a few minutes to get to his feet. Trond stood helplessly by, watching him, hands hanging by his side. He scratched his thigh uncertainly.

  “Worst thing is the piss,” Bård said, and carefully shook a leg. “In any case, you’ve still got an alibi.”

  “What?”

  “An hour and a half,” Bård said and gently tested one of his front teeth.

  “What?”

  “I can swear on the Bible that you were in the center of Oslo at half past ten and around midnight. You wouldn’t make it out here and back. Not without anyone seeing you, anyway.”

  “I could’ve taken a taxi.”

  “The driver would’ve told the police ages ago.”

  “I could’ve driven.”

  “Your car was at Mom and Dad’s. All the boys know that; they picked us up there.”

  “I
might’ve stolen one.”

  “Aw shit, this ear,” Bård said and closed his eyes as he tried to move one of his shoulders. “It’s really hurting. Do I need stitches?”

  Trond bent down closer.

  “Maybe. I’ll drive you down to the emergency room.”

  “You still have an alibi, Trond.”

  “Yes, I was at Smuget. All evening.”

  Bård bit himself gently on his split lip.

  “Okay,” he said and nodded.

  They looked at each other. It’s like looking into my own eyes, thought Trond, even though his brother was beaten and damned. The same slightly slanting left eye. Green specks in the blue iris. The epicanthic fold in the corner of the eye, which his mother always said was so unusual in this country. Even their eyebrows, which were so fair that their foreheads almost looked naked, were the same. He had beaten up his brother. He couldn’t understand why. And he found it even harder to believe that he’d managed to do it—Bård was stronger, faster, and much bolder.

  “Okay,” Bård said and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “You were at Smuget. All night. Fine.”

  He limped toward the living room door.

  “I won’t say anymore,” he said and stopped. “But—”

  He turned around and took a breath.

  “No one is going to think you killed Victoria, Trond. I think you should tell the police everything. I can come with you, if you want.”

  “I was at Smuget all night,” Trond repeated. “So it’s not necessary.”

  Bård shrugged and limped on.

  He was on his way to the bedroom to lay claim to Trond’s most expensive pants. He could have Theresa, his fiancée, hem them. He had a right to take at least his best pants.

  “You gave me a good beating,” he muttered, impressed.

  The visit to Yvonne Knutsen was not a success. Johanne had already been warned in the corridor. The nurse whispered that she was suffering from severe MS and refused to see most people. Only her son-in-law and granddaughter were always welcome.

  The woman in white was right. Yvonne Knutsen clammed up the minute Johanne walked into the room. She lay rigid in her bed, which stood in the center of the room. Otherwise the room was more or less empty. A faded lithograph hung askew in a broken frame on one wall, and there was a wooden chair by the bed. Through the dirty, streaked windowpanes, the sharp light of the low sun that had blinded Johanne as she drove the last stretch to the nursing home had been reduced to a dull disk above the horizon. Johanne got nothing out of Yvonne Knutsen other than “Please go away” before the sick woman turned her head and pretended to fall asleep.

  “I’m so sorry,” the nurse had said while resting a comforting hand on her shoulder when she came out, as if it was Johanne’s mother who lay there motionless, waiting to die.

  The journey home was awful. One of her tires went flat on the E18 on the way back to Oslo. It took a while to find a rest stop where she could pull over, and when she finally inspected the tire, she could see that it was frayed to shreds. It was raining buckets and was stormy, and by the time she got the jack out, she was soaked to the skin.

  She finally got home, an hour late.

  “MS is a horrible disease,” she muttered and rearranged the cushions to get more comfortable. She was sitting on the sofa in her sweats, with Ragnhild half asleep at her breast.

  “You think all illnesses are horrible,” replied Adam.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh, yes you do.”

  He put a large spoon of honey in her tea and stirred it.

  “Drink up. I’ve put some ginger in, so that should help.”

  “It’s too hot. What if Ragnhild moved suddenly and I spill—”

  “Here,” he said with determination and took the baby. “She’s full. Drink up so you don’t catch anything. Do you want a shot of something?”

  “No thank you. It was so awful to see.”

  “I agree. I had to talk to her just after the murder.”

  Johanne lifted the cup to her mouth.

  “Tell me about it,” Adam said, and sat down on the sofa facing her.

  She pulled up her feet and tucked the cushions behind her back.

  “Fiona has two children,” she said.

  “Fiona, she’s . . . she’s got a daughter.”

  “Yes, but she definitely gave birth to two children.”

  Ragnhild burped. Adam put her over his shoulder and stroked her tiny back.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Nor do I, in fact,” she retorted.

  She reached out for the papers he had given her when she got home, soaking wet and grumpy. The bottom page was still damp and soft.

  “In the medical records from Fiona’s pregnancy and birth, she is constantly referred to as a first-time mother. And I can assure you”—she dropped the papers back onto the table and made herself more comfortable—“a doctor or a midwife can easily identify whether a woman has had a child before or not. It’s routine. But nothing like that is written in the records. Fiorella was delivered by cesarean, and it was planned. As far as I can tell from Fiona’s records, she suffered from anxiety in connection with giving birth, which they obviously took seriously. A cesarean on a set date, for no reason other than the psychological.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  Adam put Ragnhild down in the crib, which had been moved back into the living room. He was rocking it gently with his feet.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Not so strange. Everyone thinks that Fiorella was Fiona’s first child. The doctors too, even though they must have known it wasn’t the case.”

  “But you”—Adam’s brow was wrinkled with skepticism—“you know better than everyone else.”

  “Not me, the pathologist.”

  She went into the kitchen and came back with the teapot in one hand and the autopsy report in the other.

  “Perineal rupture,” she read out loud.

  “Which means?”

  “Think about it.”

  “I’m thinking. What does it mean?”

  “Listen to the words,” she said impatiently and helped herself to more tea and honey. “I’m coming down with a cold.”

  “Oh give it up,” Adam said. “Tell me what you’re getting at. How can you—”

  “Perineum,” she interrupted, “is the medical term for the area between the vagina and the anus. A perineal rupture can occur during childbirth, when you get torn from—”

  “Enough,” he said and made a face. “I understand. But why the hell haven’t we seen that? If it’s there in black and white . . .”

  He was put out and leaned over the coffee table, grabbed the autopsy report from her, and started to read.

  “You just didn’t get what it meant,” Johanne said. “You simply ignored it. You were blinded by looking for some sort of sexual motive, so—”

  “Ignored it,” Adam asked, raising his voice. “Ignored it?”

  “You’re in good company. It’s been revealed that in the Knutby case, the Swedish police shelved a possible murder because they didn’t know what ‘toxic mass’ meant. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Preferably not,” he retorted, leafing frantically through the report trying to find something. “But these new . . . What about that medical report there?”

  He tapped the other papers with his finger. “Why would the doctors lie? Are the records fake?”

  “Probably not. I called my cousin, Evan—the doctor you met—”

  “I remember Evan. What did he say?”

  Adam sat down in the sofa opposite her again.

  “There can be only one reason why the records don’t include details that are so relevant for doctors and midwives, and so easy to verify,” Johanne explained.

  “And that is?”

  “If it would cause considerable distress to the patient to include it. Considerable distress, Evan said. And as far as I understood, doctors attach great importance
to that.”

  They sat in silence. Adam scratched his neck. The craving for a cigar had returned. He swallowed and stared out the window, distracted. The rain was drumming on the windowpane. A car had stopped. “Kids,” he thought. The engine revved up again and again. Someone shouted something, the others laughed. A door slammed, and the car jangled down the road and vanished.

  Ragnhild was fast asleep. Jack trotted in from the hall. He stood for a moment with his head to one side, ears pricked, as if he couldn’t quite believe how quiet it was. Then he buried his snout in Adam’s lap and pawed his thighs.

  “Not the sofa,” Adam mumbled. “Lie down on the floor. Down, boy.”

  The dog appeared to shrug his shoulders and then crept lithely under the table and jumped up onto the other sofa, beside Johanne.

  “Can you get that kind of injury from rape or something like that?” Adam eventually asked, without commenting on how badly trained the shit brown dog was.

  “Adam, really.”

  “But—”

  “Imagine a birth. A child’s head. Why do you think women get torn?”

  Adam stuck his fingers in his ears.

  “The answer is no,” Johanne said. “Not from rape.”

  “But”—Adam tried again and swallowed—“wouldn’t a man . . . Wouldn’t Bernt have noticed if—”

  “No,” Johanne replied. “At least, that’s what Evan said. Not necessarily. Not during intercourse or . . . other such pleasure.”

  He smiled. “Strange.”

  She smiled back. “But it’s the truth.”

  Jack growled in his sleep.

  “So, to sum up,” Adam said and stood up again. He stroked his chin with his thumb and index finger. “We can confirm the following: Fiona Helle was pregnant twice. The first child was born under circumstances in which she tore badly. It must have been a long time ago, as there is nothing to indicate that Bernt Helle knows anything about the child. And nor does anyone else. Fiona publicly expressed her delight at being a late first-time mother. She would hardly have dared to say something like that if there was anyone out there who knew . . .”